The NFT gaming bubble ballooned just a tiny bit further today when developer Gala Games announced that its free NFT-enabled battle royale game, Grit, will launch on the Epic Games Store.
This would make it the first NFT game to debut on Epic's platform, which would appear to be a big step for the legitimacy of such Web3 endeavors. It’s not clear when the game will go live, but you can check out its store page. No offense to Gala Games, but I'm still skeptical of the concept, and I'm not alone in thinking so.
Reactions to the Grit announcement ranged from apathy to scorn. An early gameplay clip posted to Twitter looked like an actual game developed by people who have held a controller at least one time — which is more than I can say for popular NFT competitors like Axie: Infinity — but not a particularly compelling or innovative one. Generally, if you're going to show off your hot new shooter, you should probably show some actual gunfights.
As you can see from the below clip, Gala apparently decided to go with the "spinning slowly around an ugly room" route instead.
When Twitter users pushed back on content creator Brycent's claim that Grit looks "insane in the membrane," Brycent responded that Twitter's video compression destroyed the footage, and that it "looks triple-A in person." Yep, sounds legit.
As I discussed in a previous piece, while Web3 (i.e. blockchain-enabled) games continue to attract huge amounts of funding from investors, the general video game playerbase has yet to be convinced of the "play-to-earn" model. While there surely is some sort of future for blockchain games, it’s unlikely they will ever reach the heights that their proponents envision for them, especially since big gaming platforms like Steam have said that they will not sell the products.
NFT games will probably have an arc similar to that of the early days of VR headsets — pushed by ecstatic enthusiasts with a little too much skin in the game, but the average player will remain unconvinced. Especially if the games look like this.
